Well, it happened. After a lifetime of service to poor and maltreated children, I’ve been accused of racism. I knew it would happen eventually. I couldn’t keep saying with impunity that children shouldn’t be collateral damage in an attempt to avoid “punishing” parents who happen to be members of a minority group.

As the authors put it, “Maisha Joefield thought she was getting by pretty well as a young single mother in Brooklyn, splurging on her daughter, Deja, even though money was tight. When Deja was a baby, she bought her Luvs instead of generic diapers when she could.” The authors went on to describe the night when an exhausted Ms. Joefeld put Deja to bed and “plopped into the bath with earphones on.” Ms. Joefeld was indeed tired. Deja was placed in foster care after she was found wandering the streets of Queens at midnight after trying and failing to rouse her mother.

I thought the authors’ concept of good mothering seemed to be a little backwards, as it prioritized spending on brand names over being available to respond to a small child at any time of the day or night. So I wrote, “It is odd to me that the authors seem to consider splurging on brand-name diapers, sneakers, or apparel to be an indicator of good motherhood.”

Little did I know the firestorm I was launching. The authors had said nothing about sneakers or apparel, but I grouped them with diapers, because I was making a general point about some parents’ undue preoccupation with brand names. And those words were a trigger to to those advocates of family preservation under all circumstances who are always looking for a chance to cry racism.

In an email I received 15 months after publication of my op-ed, the Publisher of the Chronicle of Social Change told me that the Chronicle would be publishing a publisher’s note concerning my use of “racially charged language” and asked me whether I wanted to submit a statement that he would consider including.

What the Chronicle eventually published was called An Apology for a Regrettable Chronicle Op-Ed. In it the publisher and Editor state that “the trope of a low-income mom buying children designer clothes, at the expense of spending on more critical family needs, does exist as a crude and often racial stereotype.” They apologize for their “poor judgement” in allowing “a callous dismissal of a young single mother’s very human efforts to do right by her daughter” to stand. They deleted my piece from their website. And they did not publish my statement that I had sent to the publisher at his request. Here is what I said:

This statement [about brand-named diapers, clothing and shoes] was based not on racism but on my experience as a social worker in foster care. It was not unusual for birth parents to complain when foster parents dressed their kids in clothes that were not stylish or (God forbid) handed down. It was also not uncommon for them to splurge on high-end apparel or athletic shoes, or talk about splurging on them, in visits to their children. All of these behaviors together made a big impression on me. That some parents who had subjected their children to abuse or neglect seemed to care passionately about the brand of diapers, clothing or shoes their child wore seemed contradictory and illustrated a fundamental problem with their parenting.

I expressed my feelings most clearly in an adoption hearing that I will never forget. One of my favorite foster parents, an African-American woman I will call “Ms. Brown,” had petitioned to adopt “Ronald,” a little boy whom she had loved and cared for as her own for several years. “Ronald’s” father, a drug user who often showed up to visits with his son high or exploded with rage during visits, often requiring a police presence, was fighting the adoption tooth and nail with the help of his very aggressive lawyer. Through the lawyer, the father raised the issue that “Ronald” was often dressed in what seemed to be hand me downs or cheap clothes. The Judge asked for my opinion and I gave it to her. I told her how this father resembled many other birth parents, who are more concerned with the newness and style of their children’s clothes than with the safety, security and most importantly love provided by the foster parent. For me, the father’s question illustrated his inability to understand what matters to a child (love and security) and what doesn’t (brand names.) The judge cut me off, admonishing me sharply for my editorial comments. But I hope she understood. She eventually approved the adoption. I recently saw “Ronald,” and he is thriving with “Ms. Brown.”

Because I worked in the District of Columbia, most of my clients (parents and children) were African-American. If I had worked in Maine or Indiana, I have no doubt that I would have seen some of the same patterns among white parents. Perhaps it is an issue of class [to some extent]. But I think most of all it reflects parents who have not grown up sufficiently themselves to understand that their children are not dolls to be dressed up in a way that reflects well on parents and that they need love, not brand-name diapers or fancy clothes. No, my words were not racist. They were about what matters for children, and what doesn’t. Children should be at the heart of this debate, not racial groups.

Readers who have worked with abusive and neglectful parents as social workers, therapists, or in other capacities will recognize the phenomenon I describe here. The fact that neither the New York Times journalists nor the publisher of the Chronicle (who was clearly puzzled by where my reference came from if not racism) understood this shows their distance from the people they are writing about. Nor do they understand that many healthy and mature parents of all races, such as the foster parent I called “Ms. Brown,” are completely unconcerned with brand names.

I have written before, and will write again, about what has been called “the liberal dilemma of child welfare reform.” Many of my fellow liberals seem to be reluctant to “punish” parents whose problems in parenting stem from poverty and racism by taking away their children or even monitoring and offering services to these families. The whole idea of “punishing” parents, which was used in the title of the Times article, reveals the emphasis on parents’ rights over child safety. But if we succumb to this attitude, we may be condemning poor and minority children to years of suffering and even death. Is that really the anti-racist position?

Some of these who advocate family preservation at any cost are eager to describe any criticism of an African-American parent as racist. They use the fear of being called racist to suppress expressions of alternative viewpoints. As a child of Holocaust survivors, I am well aware of what can happen when fear paralyzes free speech. I was sad to see the Chronicle respond so pusillanimously the demand that I be silenced.

On September 13, 2018, a Los Angeles County judge denied a motion to dismiss felony child abuse and falsification of records charges against four former child welfare caseworkers in the 2013 death of ten-year-old Gabriel Fernandez. The charges, filed in 2016, marked the first time Los Angeles caseworkers were criminally charged for misconduct connected with their work, and is one of only a few similar cases nationwide.

If Gabriel’s case is one of the few child deaths to result in prosecution of state workers, the egregious nature of the state’s failure explains why. A brilliant article by investigative reporter Garret Therolf shows that for seventh months, evidence of Gabriel’s abuse steadily accumulated. Yet again and again, the Los Angeles Department of Child and Family Services (DCFS) failed to intervene. Some of the worst errors are listed below.

Gabriel’s mother had been the subject of at least four calls to the child abuse hotline, had abandoned one child, and had lost custody of a son a year older than Gabriel. Yet, this record was never reviewed by workers investigating multiple reports of suspicious injuries to Gabriel.

Each time investigators came to the home, they interviewed Gabriel and his siblings with his mother in the room, against agency policy and common sense. And each time they did so, he recanted his previous statements. Even after he came to school with his face full of bruises from being shot by his mother with a BB gun, he recanted and told the investigator the injuries were from playing tag with his siblings. In the face of visible evidence, the investigators repeatedly chose to believe the repeated recantations

Investigators never spoke with neighbors or school personnel (other than the teacher who reported the abuse) but according to Therolf the abuse was known widely among school staff.

A computer program had found Gabriel to be at “very high risk” of abuse, requiring that the case be “promoted,” usually involving asking a court to require services or foster care. But the investigator, backed up by her supervisor, referred Gabriel’s mother to voluntary family services. Gabriel’s mother Pearl Fernandez withdrew from these services after three visits.

During the brief period of voluntary services, Gabriel wrote several notes saying he wanted to kill himself. Gabriel’s therapist informed the caseworker and supervisor, but they took no action.

The therapist had grown concerned that Gabriel was being abused, but her supervisor told her not to call the hotline so as not to jeopardize the mother’s participation in the voluntary case.

After three visits, Pearl Fernandez asked for her voluntary case to be closed. The caseworker accepted her decision, stating that there were no safety or risk factors for the children. Contrary to policy, her supervisor signed off on the case closure without reading the file.

After the case was closed, a security guard at the welfare office saw Gabriel covered with cigarette burns and other marks and being yelled at by his mother. The called DCFS twice and got lost in the automated system. The 911 operator gave him the non emergency line, which he called. He was later told that a sheriff’s deputy had gone to the home and seen nothing wrong.

Gabriel’s teacher, who had lost hope of any rescue from DCFS, called the DCFS investigator one more time late in April when Gabriel showed up looking worse than she had ever seen him. One eye was blood-red, skin was peeling off his forehead, and other marks were on his face, neck and ear. Her call was never returned. Gabriel had only about a month left to live.

Investigators later learned that during the weeks before his death, Gabriel was spending days and nights locked in a cabinet with a sock in his mouth, hands tied, a bandanna over his face, and handcuffs on his ankles. His solitude was interrupted by vicious beatings and torture sessions in which his siblings were required to participate. On May 22, Pearl and Aguirre tortured Gabriel a final time with a BB gun, pepper spray, coat hangers and a baseball bat. When they finally called 911, paramedics found two skull fractures, broken ribs, several teeth knocked out, BB gun pellet marks, cigarette burns on his feet and genitals, a skinned neck, and cat feces in his throat.

Therolf poses a key question regarding Gabriel’s death: “Was [the] failure …to protect Gabriel an isolated one—the fault of four employees so careless and neglectful that they allowed a child to suffer despite a series of glaring warning signs? Or was it a systemic one, the result of a department so ill-equipped to safeguard children that tragedies were bound to happen?”

While Therolf does not actually answer the question, his report offers a number of key findings and insights that point strongly in the direction of systemic factors as the prime contributors to the failure to protect Gabriel. Therolf found that many of the errors made by investigators, such as failure to interview children alone or to speak with witnesses outside the family, were prevalent in Los Angeles County. Sadly, many of the same failures were evident in the very recent case of Anthony Avalos, also in Los Angeles. And we also see similar failures , and in cases around the country, including Kansas, New York, and Oregon.

The systemic factors that cause these failures fall into two major categories–resource constraints and ideological factors.

Resource Constraints

Child welfare involves a balancing act between too much intervention or “erring on the side of child safety” as Therolf puts it and too little or “erring on the side of family preservation.” Striking this critical balance requires a combination of knowledge, skill, and time. In other words, as Therolf puts it, “it requires a highly trained workforce with the resources to carry out a thorough investigation in every case.” Therolf rightly contends that most agencies don’t have these resources. One has only to read the constant stream of news reports of overwhelming caseloads and poor training of child welfare workers around the country. All of this reflects the unwillingness of taxpayers and legislatures to provide what is needed to protect children. Inadequate funds mean caseloads are too high and salaries are too low, both resulting in low standards for caseworkers.

More funding and could buy both lower caseloads and higher salaries, which are necessary to obtain more qualified investigative workers. After reading so many similar stories, and recalling my own rudimentary training as a Child Protective Services (CPS) worker I am beginning to think that ultimately CPS Investigation should be a specialty in Masters in Social Work Programs. Students would learn advanced interviewing skills and how to assess the truthfulness of children and adults rather than, for example, believing children when they recant allegations with their parents in the room. Alternatively, CPS Investigations could be folded into the growing field of Forensic Social Work. In any case, a Masters-level specialization could be required in order to be a CPS worker, also adding a needed level of prestige to an important, difficult and hard-to-fill job.

Ideological Constraints

Inadequate resources might result in a random distribution of agency errors between those that involve too much intervention and those that involve too little. But the dominance of a particular ideology may skew the errors in one direction or another. And Garrett Therolf alludes to the rise of an ideology prioritizing family preservation nationwide and particularly in California during the years preceding Gabriel’s death. This ideology contributed to the decline in foster care numbers around the nation and particularly in Los Angeles, where Therolf reports the number of children in foster care fell from about 50,000 in 1998 to 19,000 in 2013. Much of this decline occurred during the tenure of DCFS administrator David Sanders, who later went on to lead Casey Family Programs, a foundation worth over two billion that has played an outsize role in national child welfare policy. The same year that Sanders took over at Casey, it declared a new goal to reduce the number of children in foster care by half by 2020.

Therolf was right to point a finger at Casey Family Programs. In my post about the death of two children by child abuse in Kansas, I wrote about how Casey leverages its massive wealth to affect policy directly, bypassing the voting public. It provides financial and technical assistance to state and local agencies, conducts research, develops publications, and provides testimony to promote its views to public officials around the country. Through its wealth in an underfunded field, Casey has been able to directly influence policy at the federal, state, and local levels.

Therolf points out that opinions on child welfare often cut across traditional political groupings. While Casey tends to support progressive causes, its emphasis on family preservation is often shared by conservatives who desire to reduce the government’s incursions on parental authority and at the same time to reduce spending. Working together, Casey and the George W. Bush administration created a waiver policy that allowed child welfare agencies to direct unused foster care funds toward family preservation services–a policy change which created an incentive to reduce the use of foster care. Therolf links this incentive to the drastic decline in the Los Angeles County foster care rolls between 1998 and 2013, stating that “When Gabriel came to the attention of DCFS, the chances of an abused child being placed in foster care were “lower than they’d been in many years.”

Perhaps all of the factors that led up to Gabriel’s death can be summed up by a striking statement by the supervisor on Gabriel’s case, who is currently standing trial in Gabriel’s death. He told Therolf that he had “concluded long ago that some of the children who depended on the department would inevitably be injured, if not killed.” He expressed frustration that administration and the public expected him to prevent all such deaths. This is not an acceptable attitude. It is true that a child welfare agency cannot prevent deaths among children who are unknown to the agency. But to expect that children will die under the agency’s watch–that is a low expectation indeed. We must do better by our most vulnerable children.

I recently read a book that should be a must-read for all involved in child welfare policy. In Etched in Sand, Regina Calcaterra tells of being left at the age of eleven to care for her two younger siblings while her mother disappeared for weeks at a time. When she was home, her mother savagely beat the children. Chronically malnourished and living in fear, Calcaterra was responsible for feeding, clothing, and protecting her younger siblings–and making sure they looked clean and well-fed so as not to draw the attention of the authorities who might place them in foster care.

Despite her horrific childhood, the goal of Regina and her older siblings, as she said in an interview for Youtube TV, “was to never to be picked up by the authorities because when the authorities found out how we were living, they would separate us.” When Regina was finally unable to satisfactorily explain the results of a savage beating, the children were indeed taken into care and separated.

No maltreated children should have to hide their plight in order to avoid separation from each other. Yet, this is undoubtedly the situation facing many children even while you read this. I myself know two girls who, for fear of being separated, remained for two years with an uncaring guardian who diverted her guardianship stipend to her own needs. The girls only recently broke the silence, and were removed from this toxic home.

Sibling relationships are known to be critically important in emotional development in childhood and beyond, as documented in a useful publication from the Child Welfare Information Gateway. In abusive and neglectful families, sibling relationships can be even more important as siblings support each other through adverse circumstances.

Keeping siblings together in foster care provides an important element of continuity for children who have already suffered a traumatic removal from the home they had known. As the the brief cited above puts it, “For children entering care, being with their brothers and sisters promotes a sense of safety and well-being, and being separated from them can trigger grief and anxiety.” Some studies have reported poorer outcomes for children separated from their siblings in foster care.

We don’t know how many siblings are separated in foster care. Older studies indicate that a large proportion of foster children were separated from at least some of their siblings, but the proportions varied by location. Current, national data are not available.

In most cases siblings are separated for no other reason than the lack of foster homes that can accommodate siblings, especially larger sibling groups. There is a nationwide shortage of foster parents, but foster parents who are able to take more than two siblings are even more scarce.

In some states, like North Carolina and Florida, family-style group homes have been an important vehicle for keeping siblings together. Many of these homes, such as Crossnore School and Children’s Home in North Carolina and A Kid’s Place in Florida provide highly enriched services to their residents with the help of public and private philanthropic funding. These homes often use a family-style model based on houseparents that mimics a family home. Group homes are serving sibling groups in many other states, including California, Texas and New York.

Unfortunately, the recently passed Family First Prevention Services Act (FFPSA) threatens these important havens for sibling groups and may result in mass separations of siblings. That’s because FFPSA eliminates federal funding for placement of children in congregate-care settings such as group homes beyond two weeks, unless an assessment shows that a child’s needs cannot be met with family members or in a foster family home. Moreover, group facilities must meet criteria as “Qualified Residential Treatment Programs” designed to meet the needs of “children with serious emotional or behavioral disorders.”

FFPSA is based on the widely-held belief in child welfare circles that most children do better in a family than in another type of setting. However, experts such as Dave Bundy, President and CEO of the Children’s Home Society of America, believe that it is better to keep siblings together in congregate care than to split them up among separate foster homes.

Moreover, many legislators and executives pressing for closing group homes have much more than children’s best interests at heart. The greater cost of congregate care has clearly contributed to its growing unpopularity and to the bipartisan support of FFPSA. But these comparisons are often deceptive. Facilities like Crossnore and the Florida Sheriffs Youth Ranches provide therapists, case managers, after-school activities, and other services, such as therapeutic riding. Moreover, they bring in substantial private funding in addition to state support. And no matter how expensive they are, they cannot cost more than keeping children in hotels and offices when there are no homes for them, which is happening around the country.

Siblings have already been separated due to the policies against congregate care that have already taken hold in some states. From 2006 to 2015, Sonoma County Children’s Village was a haven for 24 foster children, including sibling groups, who lived in four homes staffed by “village parents,” with surrogate grandparents living in onsite apartments. But after California began to limit group home placements for children requiring high levels of care, the village had to close. Sixteen children, including a group of seven siblings, had to leave. The children were devastated. They sent out appeals to the likes of Barack Obama and Taylor Swift, but to no avail.

There is another approach to housing large sibling groups which in practice looks very similar to family-style group homes. Some child welfare agencies contract with private agencies, such as Neighbor to Family in Florida and Georgia, that provide homes where siblings can live together in foster care. Some of these programs actually provide larger houses in clusters or “neighborhoods” to foster parents willing to care for large sibling groups but who don’t have the space. This clustering provides the added benefit of community support and shared facilities for recreation and other activities. Such programs include the SOS Children’s Villages in Illinois and Florida. New homes are currently being built in locations around the country including Oklahoma, and Southwest Florida. However these programs are too few and far between to make a dent on the national problem of sibling separation in foster care.

Perhaps all the group homes that keep siblings together could eventually be replaced by family foster homes with housing provided by public and private agencies. The feasibility of this approach would have to be investigated; it might be even harder to find good foster parents than it is to find good houseparents, because the latter generally have a schedule that allows time off to return to their own residences, while being replaced by a substitute couple. In any case, such a transition would take years to accomplish and could not occur in the short period preceding the implementation of the FFPSA provisions, which go into effect on October 1, 2019. States can apply for a two-year delay in implementing these provisions but then they must forego the opportunity to received federal matching funds for services to prevent foster care placements. (For a detailed explanation, see the “Cliffs’ Notes on Family First” from the Chronicle of Social Change.)

The sponsors and supporters of FFPSA likely had no idea that sibling separation might be a consequence of their legislation. Once they understand what they have done, I hope they will consider amending FFPSA to make congregate care allowable for sibling groups and provide a new funding stream to encourage jurisdictions to build foster home communities where siblings can thrive together.

There is an old political adage that you should “never let a crisis go to waste,” meaning that a crisis can awaken public interest and create an opportunity to advance policies that might otherwise be unachievable.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt, for instance, was able to pass much of his New Deal – including a dramatic expansion of the country’s social safety net via the Social Security Act – in the wake of the Great Depression with the American economy in shambles and the American public desperate for government support.

Unfortunately, in a cruel twist of irony, some child advocates are now using the devastation wrought by the Trump administration’s separation of children from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border to advance arguments undermining a key part of the Social Security Act – support for children who cannot be cared for in their own homes.

Several weeks ago, Sherry Lachman, the executive director of Foster America, authored a Time essaysuggesting “family separation is not just a problem at the border.” In this piece, Lachman bizarrely equates the separations at the border with removals of U.S. children from their homes by child protective services, suggesting even the latter are “inherently toxic.”

And last week, Vivek Sankaran associated the two systems, misleadingly citing statements in an opinion piecethat were made about the border separations to attack child removals by child protective services – without disclosing that these statements actually referred to the latter rather than the former. Sankaran quotes Dr. Charles Nelson, professor of pediatrics at Harvard, as follows: “[T]here is so much research on [child removal] that if people paid attention at all to the science, they would never do this.”

Finding it hard to believe that a distinguished Harvard professor would suggest that children should never be removed into foster care, we contacted Dr. Nelson, who explained that his words were taken out of context, as he was referring to separations at the U.S.-Mexico border and not the removal of children from abusive or neglectful homes. Dr. Nelson agreed that any comparison of the two systems is misconceived, noting: “It is inappropriate to compare children experiencing forced separations from their parents in the context of migration to children removed from parental care due to maltreatment (abuse, neglect).”

The separation of children from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border was an ill-conceived policy that arose from the desire to discourage migration. Rather than being aimed at protecting children, this policy was adopted despite the obvious fact that it would be extremely harmful to them.

The child welfare system, on the other hand, was created to protect children from harm inflicted by their own parents or guardians. It is a sad fact that some homes are dangerous to their own children. Forty-nine states reported1,700 child fatalities due to abuse or neglect in 2016, and there is wide consensusthat this is likely an under count. We don’t know how many more are severely injured but survive; it is doubtless much higher.

And deaths and severe injuries are only the tip of the iceberg. There is extensive literatureon the lifelong consequences of child abuse and neglect. These include chronic health conditions, impaired brain development, poor mental and emotional health, social difficulties, juvenile delinquency and adult criminality, alcohol and drug abuse, and an increased likelihood of abusing one’s own children.

Moreover, foster care is a rarely-used intervention by CPS. Most systems try hard to keep children at home by providing services to the parents to help remedy the conditions that caused the maltreatment. In 2016, according to federal data, agencies placed slightly over 200,000 children involved in maltreatment investigations in foster care and provided other post-investigation services to about 1.1 million children and families.

Yes, removing children from their parents is often traumatic to the child. But it goes without saying that in some terrible home situations, the damage to a child of staying in the current home would be greater than the damage caused by removal.

As Dr. Nelson puts it:

Of course we would like to see the biological parents be successful in changing the family dynamics and preserving the parent-child relationship but if that is impossible, and the harms to the child continue, then the child should be removed from the home, either temporarily, if the home situation can be remedied, or permanently.

But, it is of utmost importance to act with alacrity – I think in many cases children are left for far too long in their biological homes and by the time they are placed into foster care or adoptive care, they may be irreparably harmed.

Setting aside the vastly different reasons for, and targets of, family separations at the border and child removals by child protective services, there are huge differences between the two sets of policies. Cathy Senderling-McDonald recently wrote an instructive and comprehensive summary of the distinctions, outlining the vast differences in living conditions, objectives, legal structure and oversight.

Using the suffering of parents and children at the border to denigrate foster care is not merely an illogical comparison, it is a harmful one that can result in suffering, lifelong damage, and even death to children. Moreover, it is offensive to those professionals who have devoted their lives to protecting children, and to the children who have suffered and died for lack of such protection.

Let us be clear: we want to prevent children from being removed from their parents whenever it is safe and appropriate to do so.

But let us be equally clear: until we eliminate serious child maltreatment and endangerment from every home, there will always be a need for foster care to keep kids safe. To pretend otherwise is naïve, dangerous and irresponsible.

This op-ed was published in the Chronicle of Social Change on September 6, 2018. I wrote it with Sean Hughes, the director of government relations for the consulting firm Social Change Partners.

On June 21, the suffering ended for ten-year-old Anthony Avalos when his tortured body finally succumbed to years of abuse. The ten year old had severe head injuries and cigarette burns all over his body when his mother found him unresponsive and called 911. Anthony died the next morning. Despite sixteen reports to the Los Angeles Department of Child and Family Services (DCFS) or the police, the agencies tasked with protecting Anthony never rescued him from the adults that had abused him for years. Without a new law requiring public disclosure of the details of such cases, the public will never know how Anthony’s peril was missed or what changes are needed to protect future children from his horrible fate.

School administrators, a teacher, a counselor, family members and others called police or the child abuse hotline at least 16 times since 2013 to report abuse of Anthony or one of his six siblings, as revealed in a devastating article by respected investigative reporter Garrett Therolf published by the Los Angeles Times. DCFS received twelve reports between 2013 and 2015, according to its director, Bobby Cagle.

According to these reports, “Anthony or his six siblings were denied food and water, sexually abused, beaten and bruised, dangled upside-down from a staircase, forced to crouch for hours, locked in small spaces with no access to the bathroom, forced to fight each other, and forced to eat from the trash.”

Most of the allegations concerned Anthony. Among the alleged abusers were his mother, Heather Barron, her boyfriend, Karim Leiva, and another family member who was left in charge of the children and was accused of sexual abuse.

According to the sources, only some of the investigations resulted in a finding of child abuse. And even when abuse was found, the children were only once placed with an uncle and aunt, from whom they were soon removed and brought back to their mother over protests from the relatives, according to the aunt. She reports that she started making calls to DCFS in 2015 when she noticed injuries the children said were inflicted by Leiva.

Anthony’s father, a Mexican citizen, reported that Anthony asked to live with him but his mother refused. Aware that Anthony was being treated badly, he repeatedly gave case workers his contact information in Mexico. But he never heard back.

Instead of placing Anthony with his father or aunt and uncle, DCFS workers opened at least two cases to help Anthony’s mother improve her parenting while the children remained in the home. But these cases where closed without any resolution of the safety threat to these vulnerable children.

These horror stories of deaths of children after multiple serious allegations to police and child welfare agencies never seem to end. The first step in preventing more tragedies is to conduct a detailed case review to identify the critical decision points where an opportunity was missed. It is likely that DCFS has already begun such an internal review. But it will be shared only with the county Board of Supervisors, which will hold it close.

This state secrecy is not unique to Los Angeles. Only a few states provide for the release of information about agency interactions with children who died of abuse or neglect. Texas’ Office of Child Safety posts reviews of fatalities but only when a child died of abuse or neglect during an open case. Florida requires an immediate investigation of a child’s death if the family was involved with CPS in the past year and posts the review if the child was found to have died of abuse or neglect. In Washington, the Children’s Administration (CA) conducts a review (by experts with no prior involvement in the case) when the death or near-fatality of a child was suspected to be caused by child abuse or neglect, and the child had any history with the CA at the time of death or in the year prior. These reviews must be completed within 180 days and posted on the agency’s website.

The Washington legislation, which requires reviews for families having history with child welfare within the past two years, is the broadest and most useful requirement. However, the universe of cases covered should be increased to include families that had contact with the child welfare agency within the past five years at a minimum. The last report on Anthony’s family was made in April 2016, more than two years before Anthony’s death, according to a statement by Bobby Cagle, the DCFS Director. After the sixth abuse report concerning Yonatan Aguilar (also in Los Angeles County), Yonatan was locked in a closed for over four years until he was found dead in 2016.

Reviews should also be required for cases of children who suffer severe injuries due to abuse or neglect as well as cases of chronic severe maltreatment that was allowed to continue despite reports to CPS. These would include another Los Angeles County case recently in the news when a jury awarded $45 billion to a girl who suffered two years of sexual abuse after child welfare workers left her in a home with an a accused molester. We need to know how these errors happen as well.

A requirement that all states conduct and post such reviews of children who died should also be added as an amendment to the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act, which is expected to be reauthorized in 2018. When an agency egregiously abdicates its responsibility to protect children, the public must know how and why it happened. Only then can they hold their government accountable for making the changes necessary to prevent such tragedies in the future.

Fourteen-year-old Veronica Spears, her twelve-year-old sister Hayley and their fifteen-year-old brother have been living with their foster parents Tim and Anne Dorn for nine years. Valerie and Haylie want to be adopted by the Dorns and have set up a Facebook page to tell their story. Yet, an Indian tribe has asked a tribal judge to move them in with a foster parent they have met twice.

The Trump Administration’s policy of separating children from their parents created such an uproar around the country and the world that the Administration was forced to back down. Yet, a law that is almost uniformly supported by liberal politicians and activists has for years been ripping children away from the only parents they ever knew. I am referring to the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA).

Congress passed ICWA in 1978 to alleviate a national crisis, the wholesale separation of Indian children from their families. But in attempting to right a wrong, Congress created a new threat to the safety and well-being of Indian children. It established a weaker set of protections for Native American children than for other American children and subordinated their best interest to that of the tribe.

The problem with ICWA begins with how it defines an “Indian child.” Any child who is either a member of an Indian tribe or is eligible for membership in a tribe, and is the biological child of a tribe member, is considered an Indian child. While some tribes require a certain percentage of Indian ancestry, others (like the nation’s largest tribe, the Cherokees) will accept those with any amount of Indian blood.

There is no requirement that the child or parent has any connections to the tribe or its culture. That’s how tribes end up deciding the fate of children whose Native American ancestry is less than two percent and those who have no social or cultural connection to a tribe. Veronica and Haley Spears, for example, are less than half native, did not grow up in the native culture and only became members of the tribe until their mother enrolled them after they were removed from her care.

ICWA gives Indian tribal courts jurisdiction over child custody cases involving Indian children living on a reservation. For other Indian children, the state court is required to transfer the case to the tribal court if either parent, or the child’s Indian custodian, requests it. If the case remains in the state court, the tribe also has the right to intervene at any time in the proceedings, and can request transfer to tribal court.

That’s what happened to Lauryn Whiteshield and her sister. The Spirit Lake Sioux Tribe invoked their powers under ICWA to remove them from a non-Indian foster family and place them with their grandfather and his wife, despite her long history of child neglect. On November 26, 2013, a the grandfather’s wife was sentenced to 30 years in prison for throwing Lauryn down an embankment and killing her.

ICWA requires a higher standard of proof to remove an Indian child or terminate the rights of an Indian parent. An agency requesting that an Indian child be placed in foster care or adoption must prove that “active efforts” were made to prevent the breakup of the family. This standard is more difficult to meet than the “reasonable efforts” required for all children under Title IV-E of the Social Security Act. This makes it more likely that Indian children will be left in dangerous homes.

If the court orders a foster care or adoption placement, ICWA establishes an order of preferences, with a member of the child’s extended family being the first choice for both foster care and adoption. For an adoption, the second choice if a member of the extended family is unavailable is other members of the child’s tribe and the third choice is other family members. This makes it easy for tribes to take children away from foster families like the Spears that may have raised them from infancy and want to adopt them.

ICWA is often used to override the preferences of one or both parents about who will raise their child. In 1985, twin babies were born to Choctaw parents living on a Mississippi reservation. The parents drove 200 miles to give birth, hoping to escape tribal court jurisdiction, and chose a non-Indian adoptive family. The tribe brought the case to the Supreme Court, which upheld the jurisdiction of the tribal court. Ultimately, the tribe returned the babies to the adoptive family chosen by the parents. But the tribe’s right to overrule parents on custody for their children continues in effect.

ICWA has no respect for the importance of bonding between child and caregiver and the trauma imposed by separating children from their parents. In the Spears case, the appellate court that sent the case to tribal court ruled that neither the best interests of the children nor the time the children have been with their current caregivers is relevant to the decision to transfer a case to tribal court.

Guidelinesissued by the Bureau of Indian Affairs under the Obama Administration dispelled any doubt about whether the child’s best interests should play a role in Indian child welfare proceedings. They state that courts should not “conduct an independent analysis of the best interests of the child” in making decisions about foster care or adoptive placements, because placement in an Indian home is presumed to be in an Indian child’s best interests.

In my last post I wrote about the disparity between black and white placement rates in foster care. People who consider themselves advocates for black children in Minnesota are proposing legislation that would require “active efforts” to keep black children with their parents and reunify them, over and above what must be done for other children. This term is clearly drawn from ICWA, and like ICWA, the Minnesota legislation subordinates the interests of children to their “tribe” or race.

The Goldwater Institute in 2015 filed a class-action suit in Arizona (A.D. vs. Washburn) that “challenges the constitutionality of ICWA requirements that make the best interests of an Indian child less important than the desires of an Indian tribe when deciding foster care or adoption placements.” Unfortunately, a federal judge dismissed the case in 2017 for lack of standing, without ruling on the constitutionality of ICWA. A three-judge panel is now considering the Goldwater Institute’s appeal of that ruling.

The tragic results of ICWA show what happens when we treat people as part of racial groups rather than individuals. Instead of protecting Indian children, ICWA subordinates their interests to that of the tribe and deprives them of the same protections that are given to their peers who do not have Indian blood.

According to federal data, black children were 13.8 percent of the total child population in the United States in 2014. Yet, they constituted 22.6 percent of those identified as victims of maltreatment, and 24.3 percent of the children in foster care. In Minnesota, the disparities appear to be even greater. Citing these disparities, two legislators have proposed the Minnesota African American Preservation Act.

The Act would create an “African American Child Well-being Department” within the Department of Human Services to receive notification of all cases involving African-American children and “directly oversee, review, and consult on case plans and services” offered to these children. It would also create an African American Child Welfare Oversight Council. Similar to the Indian Child Welfare Act, it would set a higher bar for removing African American children from their homes than white children and require greater efforts to reunify children once removed from their families.

The bill’s sponsors argue that racial disparities in child welfare are caused by differential treatment of minority families in terms of how allegations of maltreatment are investigated, resolved, and responded to. This is belief, which was supported by early research, has become accepted by the child welfare establishment.

The idea of racial bias in child welfare found support in the first two National Incidence Studies of Child Abuse and Neglect, which were published in the 1980s and 1990s. These studies, which attempt to count all episodes of abuse and neglect rather than just those that are reported and substantiated, suggested that there was no difference in black and white child maltreatment rates. The study authors suggested that black families received differential treatment by child welfare systems, resulting in their over-representation in these systems.

Starting about 2004, a coalition of foundations, nonprofits, and academics formed around the idea that this disproportional representation of black children in child welfare stemmed from a racist system. This coalition launched a well-funded campaign to reduce the representation of black children in child welfare and especially foster care. They issued reports, held conferences, and provided training and technical assistance to help states analyze their disproportionality problems.

As a result of this work, agencies around the country have adopted strategies like staff retraining, creating special administrative structures to advance racial equity, and special data collection efforts. As a social worker in the District of Columbia, I was subjected to multiple, often poor-quality trainings that tried to help me discover my hidden biases so that they would not affect my treatment of families.

The fact that child welfare workers in many jurisdictions are disproportionately African American has not influenced the consensus in favor of such strategies, as pointed out in an excellent article by Naomi Schaefer Riley. When I pointed out in a training class that most District of Columbia child welfare social workers were African-American, I was told that did not matter, as Black social workers could be as racist as white ones.

But a cascade of new research has cast grave doubts on the accepted theory of disproportionality. The third (larger and more rigorous) National Incidence Study published in 2010 estimated that black child maltreatment rates are almost twice as high than those of whites. Further analysis showed that this difference was present in the earlier study, but due to small sample sizes, the differences were not statistically significant and hence not reported.

A conference, convened in 2011 by Harvard, Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago, the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges and the National Court Appointed Special Advocates, brought together leading scholars on child welfare and race in front of an audience of child welfare leaders from around the country. A research brief summarizing the conference that was published by Chapin Hall concluded that “there is a significant black/white maltreatment gap, one that roughly parallels the gap in official maltreatment reports. This evidence contradicts the belief that black children are included at high rates in the child welfare system because of bias.”

The brief’s authors based their conclusions on the National Incidence Study as well as other empirical work reinforcing the conclusion that child maltreatment rates are significantly higher for black children. They suggested that the higher rate of maltreatment among African-Americans stems from the history of slavery and racism, which led to higher poverty and concentration in impoverished neighborhoods characterized by crime, substance abuse, unemployment, and limited community services.

In other words, disproportionality is rooted in racism. But It’s not a racist child welfare system that results in disproportional representation of black children in the child welfare system. Rather, it is the racist history of our country that has created the difference in child maltreatment which in turn resulted in disproportional representation.

The researchers concluded that trying to reduce racial bias in the system is not the way to address the inequity between blacks and whites in child welfare. Instead, we need to address the underlying social conditions. And until we can do that, we need to protect children, both by preventing maltreatment and by providing appropriate protective services.

Since the Harvard conference, the evidence continues to accumulate that black and white maltreatment rates differ. A recent study published in the journal Pediatrics concluded that the child abuse fatality rate for children aged four and under was 8.0 per thousand African-American children, compared with 2.7 per 100,000 white children.

Unfortunately, many child welfare agencies, advocates, and legislators, including the sponsors of the Minnesota legislation, are either unaware of, or do not want to recognize, the new consensus among researchers. As The Los Angeles Times put it:

“Many left the [Harvard/Chapin Hall] conference believing that any caseworker bias against black families accounted for only a small portion of the disparity in foster care rates … Yet, Los Angeles County officials pressed forward with programs that assumed that racial bias was a significant cause for the high rate of [foster care placement] of black children.”

As I have written in the past, Native American children have been victimized by a similar type of reasoning. The Indian Child Welfare Act has been responsible for separating Indian children from loving foster families and placing them with relatives they do not know. On some occasions, these relatives have hurt or killed them.

This focus on reducing alleged systemic bias may do more harm than simply wasting child welfare resources on bureaucracy and training. If black children are more likely to be maltreated, equalizing black and white representation in the child welfare system would leave many black children in danger of years of suffering or even death. As Naomi Schaefer Riley put it, “No it’s not racist to save minority children’s lives.”